Updated: In almost as much of an anticlimax as Sunday’s Snoozer Bowl, Alphabet Inc. today again beat most expectations for its fourth quarter thanks to continued strength in its search and video advertising and investment gains. Only problem: Some higher expenses for spending on cloud engineers and data centers as well as YouTube content didn’t ...

Updated Cloud computing keeps wagging Amazon.com Inc.’s e-commerce dog, with no signs the tail-wagging will slow down anytime soon. The Seattle-based retail and cloud behemoth today reported fourth-quarter earnings that easily beat expectations thanks in part to its highly profitable Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud unit. But the company provided first-quarter guidance that fell a ...

Updated In case anyone had forgotten amid its unending data and privacy issues, Facebook Inc. actually is a business — one that keeps making a lot of money. The social networking giant proved that once again today. Facebook reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results, with a profit per share before costs such as stock compensation of $2.38 ...

Executives at Choice Hotels International Inc. realized years ago that they needed upgrade the company’s information technology systems — especially a global reservations system that, like many companies’ mission-critical systems, predated the internet. Ultimately, the owner of Quality Inn, Cambria Hotels and other chains settled on moving to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud — a ...

For a technology that’s decades old, artificial intelligence managed to emerge in the public imagination as one of the signature technologies of 2018 — if not always in a positive way. On the upside, AI and its related sets of technology such as machine learning and deep learning enable now-taken-for-granted services such as speech recognition ...

IBM Corp. is justly famous for pioneering work in artificial intelligence, even decades before its Watson computer beat a couple of “Jeopardy” champions. But in recent years, its work has been eclipsed at least in the public imagination by new AI-driven speech and image recognition services and self-driving cars from companies such as Google LLC, ...

In yet another land grab, cloud computing king Amazon Web Services Inc. today took a giant step further into the inner sanctum of customers’ data centers. At its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the Amazon.com Inc. cloud company announced Outposts, an on-premises data center system that’s based on the same hardware AWS uses to run ...

In another sign of Amazon.com Inc.’s broad ambitions in cloud computing, the company’s cloud company today debuted a new processor chip designed for machine learning. The chip, called Inferentia, will be available via Amazon Web Service Inc.’s EC2 computing service as well as its SageMaker AI service and Amazon Elastic Inference, a new service also ...

Jumping deeper into a new market, Amazon Web Services Inc. today said it will offer easier and faster cloud access to data from space via satellite communications. AWS Ground Station, announced by the Amazon.com Inc. cloud unit, will be what the company calls the first fully managed satellite ground station as a service. The Ground ...

Kicking off its annual re:Invent cloud conference with a bang Monday night, Amazon Web Services Inc. debuted among a wide array of new services a new cloud chip of its own design. Dubbed Graviton and available to its cloud customers through AWS’ EC2 cloud compute service, the Arm-based chip was designed by the chip developer ...